Page 2 - Why Isn't This Illegal?

When I was studying we had a test network lab. In there was a network setup isolated from the rest of the campus. All the PC's were tri-boot, when it loaded you had option of NT or DOS 6.22 (used for Novel) and then used a boot disk to load into Linux. People used to create problems in that room all the time. Used to do things like telnet into someone elses PC and su to root (we all knew the passwords) and then do funky things to their PC while they were using it. Also did things like replace win.exe with another program when we were using DOS. Other things done involve taking out of a network cable slightly (we were using 10Base-2, ie whole network went down) swapping monitor cables with machine next to it, and keyboard cables, swapping keys on the keyboard, the list goes on...

God... I remember DOS 5.0/6.22 - those were the days. In high-school, we had Apple computers so I got permission to install a PC in the computer lab. I was quite parnoid about people using it, and well aware that there were (even though it was an Apple school) others in the student body with a working knowlege of DOS and Win311 - I didn't want them to come in and 'f*ck'-up my machine just because it was there.

I installed DOS into a directory called _ (the white space you can create with ALT+255 - or 0xFF ASCII). That was step one, step two I wrote a program (in Turbo PASCAL! can you believe it...) to re-map all of the keys on the keyboard to 'space' (0x20). The key-remapping program ran before the Autoexec.BAT (modified boot sector: use a hex viewer and about 6-pack of Jolt or Mountain Dew... cause it takes a while to figure out!) The only way out of my key-remapper is quite cunning actually... you have to press the LEFT SHIFT key and the RIGHT mouse button at the same time - then let go of LEFT SHIFT key before you let go of the RIGHT mouse button - otherwise it calls the boot strap and the machine just reboots.... start again.

I couldn't just password protect the machine from the BIOS, I knew someone would download the manuals to my Elonex machine and figure out how to re-set the right jumpers on the board (the school was/is open 24/7... hehehe... private schools in central london are like 7-11's)

That's how paranoid I was.

It seems my paranoia would have been justified in Andreas's network lab...

Still, those were some of the best days of my life. I secretly wanted someone to hack my setup... alas, I never really found anyone else with the same interests - and while my setup was never hacked successfully, someone used a key or coin to scrach up my monitor really badly...

These are my exploits while I was in high-school (honestly, no BS):

#1. PBX - I hacked the PBX system using a cheap terminal I bought from the OXFAM shop (!) in Notting Hill Gate (Bayswater Road). -> I was in on ALL of the voice mail, plus, I dialed into the school PBX and made connect calls to EVERYWHERE. That lasted about 3 months before someone caught wind. Never found me though! I would never do something like that AGAIN... but it was quite a rush!

#2. Card Catalogue - I hacked school library system (based on Card Catalogue, I forget who makes it). I did that in two steps. First I wrote a fake login screen with a key trapper (...I am ashamed to say I was still using PASCAL over C) and installed it on a borrowed school laptop (i386 compaq laptop - remember them? HUGE white boxes...). I then temporarily disabled one of the Card Catalogue terminals (took out the fuse from the mains plug, easy enough) and stuck a piece of A4 paper saying, 'Out of Order' on it. I then chained the laptop to the already existing chain from the Card Catalogue computer and left it running for a day. My fake login screen took username/password details, then pretended to do something and finally, crash. It wasn't log before all of the librarians had had a go at typing in their own username/password in some hope that theirs might make the machine work... SO I had a huge list of passwords, and subsequently, access throughout the ENTIRE Card Catalogue system. I later went on to use this to incredible advantages... I posted something a few weeks ago about checking out books on gender issues - "Am I Gay?" on other people's behalfs, and then flagging them as OVERDUE - overdue books were always read out aloud during homeroom in the morning...

#3. Coke Machine - I 'hacked' the coke machine to give me free coke whenever I wanted. I discovered this by accident (don't know whether it works in general - our coke machine was pretty ancient) - but if you stick wire down the coin slot and then turn the machine off and on, you get to select one can of any of the drinks that the machine stocks. Honest to god, it worked. Then the school's Battle of the Bands started getting sponsored by PEPSI, and the Coke machines were all repalced. That's why I started drinking Mountain Dew... nasty, yellow stuff, that.

#4. Finger - I didn't finish High School, I quite during the first term of my Senior year (long story, but it worked out fine). As a good-bye present, I was looking for things I could do to leave my mark at the school. Lots of things went through my mind, but I wanted to affect EVERYBODY, so there was only one thing I could (and get away with). I fingered the school Intranet and got an extensive list of internal email addresses (we had almost 2000 students, like a small university). So I got a copy of IE4 beta, and using the Intranet's SMTP, I mailed three copies of IE4 to each user, in chain-mail fashion (perl script, sendmail, sent attachment from non-existing addressee to existing addressee etc.) Man, those emails bounced around from account to account for at least a week. I kept in touch with a friend at school who told me someone had caused the WHOLE network to slow down so much that it was faster to copy files between machines using floppy disks. Satisfaction at last.

Anyway, I do realise now, in my older, wiser years, that these were nothing more than petty feats - most of them very serious criminal offenses. I certainly leant a great deal from it, esp., never to do it again.

Funny how threads keep turning into "How to screw with unsuspecting users" where everyone tells their story. What was that about liability again?

That's precisely why I want the disclaimer. I PM'ed the Jcaputo directly when my topic/thread was deleted , but he hasn't responded yet. It means we can have fun, give some good advice wherever we can help and not worry about it. Anyway, this is off-topic and it's discourteous for me to talk about it without giving Jcaputo a chance to reply.

I've never been arrested or charged with any crime whatsoever, but I do admit I've made mistakes in the past.

nao

nao....hell yes! Those were honestly some of the coolest(but o so terrible)things I've ever heard. My antics look like childs play after reading that

You remind me alot of me(except for not liking Moutain Dew!)

If you're really that concerned, put a disclaimer in your sig and call it a day.

Back toward the topic, it isn't just the console windows pop-ups ads, it's the embedded ads in pages that look like forms, complete with blinking cursors. The "You've won a quintillion yen, click here to claim!" spots. It's all a ploy to get the first click out of the user. Is there that high of a follow-thru rate that they'd do this? Most ads are paid for by the click or by the view. If it's the former, they must be getting something out of it to warrant paying for such an ad campaign.

I was at my neighbor's house yesterday, reminding myself why I hate tech support and never want to get into it. Him sitting there beside me while I was figuring out this "parsing error" he kept getting helped me realize that he's probably pretty close to the average computer user. Scarcely a clue what's going on. A less frugal version of him would throw money at ads like these.

They don't know any better. Unless some international law is made, on software explicitly stating what it will perform for purchase, and then being held liable for it, I don't think there's a prayer other than education. And educating the masses is an increasingly difficult task.

The masses don't want to be educated. Education entails work because it entails being alerted to the presence of the rest of the world. Knowing about things obligates one (excepting the sociopathic individuals in our midst) to try and correct the problems and nurture things that show promise. That's exceptionally hard work, and most people aren't up to the challenge. They never were, but to complicate matters, we're looking at the ultimate in self-centered generations - a group of people so fluffy and helpless that they feel entitled to comfort and have no concept of sacrifice or suffering (a situation conventiently delivered to them on the suffering and sacrifice of the World War II generation - how's that for irony?). It's not that this is even a new problem just arrived to this generation, however, it's just that now, there's a lot more people out there to be apathetic about things, so it's easier to see. Honestly, if you can't get people interested enough to stop mass genocide, how do you get them to care about something so ultimately pointless as a misleading advertisement?

No, worrying about who gets kicked off the island next is so much easier. There's little hope for education. I have to just sort of sit back and smile and say "serves you right" when someone clicks away.....

Not really. You seemed to have missed the point that these were systems that were used for our class. We had root passwords to all machines. Security was not an issue at all. The machines were rebuilt once a week. Denying access to the machine would really defeat the purpose of having it there.

That's why I put a right after the sentence you quoted.

my only story is this
Recently i had an Introduction too Computer class in high school. Free credits what can i say.
Being the annoying bugger i am i wrote a quick Delphi app to allow me to send a UDP broadcast to another app i had made over schools network.
Program tjhat recieves initiates the shutdown procedure.
Program puts itself into start up

never caught me either cause i set up a random time delay for shutdown per app <betweeb 1 and 60> so you'd hit the button close window walk away. 50 computers in a lab start shutting off at difrent times, teacher, who doesn't even know difrent between PHP and HTML would panic call the techie who starts checkign power cables and the like
Going into an CS course next year, guess fun stops and got be serious heh

Iamien,

I've never made people loose work (except, maybe the opportunity to get work done when I did my IE4-beta blitz) This is IMAO, but to me, there's a difference between having fun and fu*king people over. I think causing remote terminals to reboot is quite serious, esp., since it involves someone potentially loosing hours of work. I'm not saying you rebooted anyone's machine while they were working on it though!

I am NOBODY to pass any kind judgement on the subject, so this really is totally IMAO. I've done just as bad!

IMHO, I think the spirit of hacking is one of self-exploration, where nobody gets hurt and the hacker can continue learning things from each system.

I've been a member of this forum for about a month or so and i feel like a.koepke is my best friend, watch this man to learn all the dirty tricks of the computer world.....

Andreas, you got a stalker.

/er/\-on/g

sorry - couldn't resist


christo